Marc Levinson documents the history and the rise of standardized shipping
containers in this astonishingly interesting book. Today, 40-foot shipping
containers full of stuff are routinely sent from factories to warehouses
without being opened in transit, even as they are loaded from truck to train
to ship and back to train to truck. Before the 1950's, no one implemented
seamless intermodal transport: at a dock, for example, longshoremen would
unload cargo from a truck or train, piece by piece, and put it in a warehouse,
then repack it again into the hold of a ship. This process was slow,
labor-intensive, liable to be interrupted by strikes, and made the goods prone to damage and theft. A 1959 report estimated
that the cost of shipping some commodities accounted for 25%(!) of the
sticker price. Shipping containers and integrated shipping changed
all this. You ever wonder why you don't hear much about dockworkers and
longshoremen these days? It's because docks don't actually need very many of
them anymore.

Levinson covers the complex web of economic, regulatory, and standardization
challenges that faced shipping container proponents. But he only hints at the real
shipping revolution: manufacturers that adopted shipping containers actually didn't
obtain substantial savings until they also retooled their businesses to use
containers end-to-end and to think of fast and reliable shipping as
something they could count on. Hence developments like just-in-time (JIT)
manufacturing and reduced inventory costs (I am now on the hunt for some reading material on these subjects).

Disclosure

I'm a software engineer at DNAnexus, Inc. This blog represents the opinion of myself and no one else.Unless specifically noted otherwise, I do not receive free review copies of books or other products mentioned here.